Quit-rent

Quit rent, Quit-rent, or quitrent, in practically all cases, is now effectively but not formally a tax or land tax imposed on freehold or leased land by a higher landowning authority, usually a government or its assigns.

Under feudal law, the payment of quit rent (Latin Quietus Redditus, pl. Reditus Quieti)[1] freed the tenant of a holding from the obligation to perform such other services as were obligatory under feudal tenure, or freed the occupier of the land from the burden of having others use their own distinct rights that affected the land (e.g., hunting rights which would have impaired farming). As such, it was a rental of distinct things that were not parcelled up in the ownership of the land itself, although connected with the full enjoyment of the land, and formally it was a sort of buy back rather than a tax. Where a true tax can be varied by the taxer, and must be paid on pain of penalties that can be varied by the taxer without formal limit, the only sanction for not paying a feudal quit rent was that the alternative burdens would return — which imposed a ceiling on how much could be demanded in payment of a quit rent in practice. Where the sanctions for non-compliance are limited in this way, a quit rent is a rent in form and name, and not a tax; where they are not so limited, a quit rent is not a rent but only in form and name, being rather a tax. The latter is the usual case today, as the former was in earlier times.

In post-feudal times, quit rents have continued to be imposed by some governments, usually attached to land grants as a form of land tax.

The quit rent system was used frequently by colonial governments in the British Empire. Many land grants in colonial America in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries carried quit rent. Quit rents went on to be used in British colonies, protectorates, etc. in Asia and elsewhere in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

Examples:

In Borneo, the Proclamation IX of 1902 became a legal requirement for natives who claimed to own cultivated lands to take out separate land titles for themselves, charged at $2.00 per title with owners made to pay annual quit rent.[2]

Some governments have now abolished the quit rent system and relieved those with a nominal quit rent obligation from the requirement to pay it, replacing quit rents with a uniform system of land tax. However, in other countries, such as Malaysia, quit rent remains an important means of raising revenue from landowners.